Writing Strategies for Rationalize Pre-Study Decisions

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Rationalize Pre-Study Decisions is perhaps the most important Strategy of Contextualize the Methods. Rationalize Pre-study Decisions is used to justify any methodological choice that leads and guides the main study. Providing information about pre-study decisions will help establish credibility for your research and help your reader trust your results as reliable and valid.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the Methods are the part of our scientific argument where we justify our plan of action. So far, we have discussed the methodological approach, design, context, and subjects/participants as main sub-strategies to Contextualize the Methods. Now it is important to think about why decisions were made in regard to those sub-strategies. Rationalizing some of our decisions and choices explicitly can provide clarity to the reader, especially when pre-study decisions are divergent or unique from other studies.

Although the Strategy – Rationalize Study Decisions is important, not all disciplines utilize this Strategy heavily in a manuscript. The choice of whether you need to justify your choices in writing should be based on standards in the field and whether or not you are diverging from what is common practice. Regardless of whether you decide to explicitly note your justifications in writing, you should always know why decisions were made so that you remain an informed, credible researcher of your own work.

Instances of rationalizing are likely to appear in each Goal presented in the Methods section to support nearly all strategic choices in the Methods. To utilize this strategy, you should ask yourself the question of why you have selected the design, the setting, and the participants that you have. Answers to this overall question help add credibility to your overall research. When asking this question, you should also be aware of the ethical, legal, and regulatory requirements for research on human subjects and for animal experimentation in your own country as well as applicable international countries with which you may collaborate. To Rationalize Pre-study Decisions, you may also refer to previous research, especially if you are replicating a design or utilizing certain stages of another study. However, you must be cautious that just because previous work has conducted a similar study using similar methods does not provide immediate justification for the decisions and choices in your study. For instance, if you are using the same survey as another study, you still have to rationalize why that survey is also relevant to your context of study. Please read the following sentence:

a. Following Author’s (YEAR) recommendations on confirmatory hypothesis testing, we chose a multilevel model reflecting our main research question.

In this sentence, the introductory phrase, “Following Author’s (YEAR) recommendations on confirmatory hypothesis testing…,” is used to justify the choice of a multilevel model, which describes the experimental design. While the previous example is only a phrase within a sentence, you may see this strategy take on the whole sentence. Take the following sentences as examples:

b. We chose our study design for a number of reasons.

c. A convenience sample was used to pilot the study design and gather basic data and trends regarding the study.

Here are more Language Use examples of Rationalize Pre-study Decisions: